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Paper short abstract

This paper introduces The Box World, a participatory and creative tool that experiments with qualitative metascientific mapping. The approach complements existing mapping methods while inviting reflection on their assumptions and implications for opening science and responsible innovation.

Paper long abstract

Metascience seeks to understand how science works by examining its practices, structures, and knowledge production systems. Mapping approaches play an important role in this effort by making patterns in scientific activity visible and opening the ‘black box’ of science to scrutiny. Such mapping increasingly relies on quantitative techniques to analyse large publication datasets.

These approaches reveal patterns in scientific activity and provide valuable insights. However, the structures metascience seeks to map are themselves produced within the same scientific systems and paradigms from which these analytical tools emerge. When research systems are operationalized through publication data, citation relations, and measurable indicators, certain institutional dynamics, epistemic assumptions, cultural habits, and everyday practices remain less visible. Mapping methods may therefore reproduce aspects of the paradigms and infrastructures they seek to critically interrogate. This raises a broader question for critical metascience: how might mapping move beyond entrenched paradigmatic boundaries, and what new insights emerge when these approaches and their assumptions become objects of metascientific scrutiny?

This paper introduces Box World, a participatory and qualitative mapping approach. The tool invites participants to collaboratively explore and map the “boxes” structuring research systems, including disciplinary boundaries, funding logics, evaluation regimes, institutional incentives, and dominant innovation narratives, making underlying structures that shape research systems and innovation visible. The session briefly demonstrates the method and uses it to reflect on metascientific mapping, presenting Box World as an experimental way to examine the paradigmatic ‘boxes’, limits, and assumptions of existing approaches while opening science and innovation to scrutiny.